


Small Worlds

by manic_intent



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: A sort of crossover with the Last of Us, Alternate Universe, Infected!Zombies, M/M, Reader does not need prior knowledge of the Last of Us, That AU where the zombie apocalypse happens shortly after WWII, Very light reference to sex, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 12:34:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1081068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manic_intent/pseuds/manic_intent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Say what you like about Erik Lehnsherr, say that he's a madman, a ruthless hunter of grudges best forgotten, but the world's a small place now, growing smaller and quieter all the time in the abandoned wastelands outside of the Quarantine Zones, and in a small and quiet world, sometimes it helps to be cautious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Worlds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keire_ke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/gifts).



> Author's Note: Unfortunately I have not watched the Walking Dead TV show, because I read quite a bit of the comic books (way back when there was no TV show, around when it first won an Eisner). Now I'm not exactly a squeamish comic book reader - I've enjoyed Lucifer, Preacher, some Hellblazer, the original books of The Authority, Rising Star, Irredeemable, etc, but the Walking Dead managed to gross me out. Yeah, that part, when they get to the prison. The barber shop.
> 
> However this year I've really enjoyed playing the Last of Us and listening to the World War Z audiobook. The appeal of zombie apocalypses to me is usually the post-apocalyptic part that comes AFTER... so ... although does not fit into the Walking Dead 'verse (and therefore isn't a crossover) and doesn't follow the prompt request to the letter, I hope the OP enjoys this pinch hit.
> 
> \--
> 
> Prompt: Written for keire_ke: Charles doesn't really know how to play baseball. He learned to swing a bat during an early onset of the Walking Dead plague, which had been contained at the time with minimal disclosure. The second outbreak, shortly after the Bromantic Tour of Mutant Gathering (TM), while they are in the CIA base, is less controlled (could eventually be contained, or it could blow up worldwide).

I.

Say what you like about Erik Lehnsherr, say that he's a madman, a ruthless hunter of grudges best forgotten, but the world's a small place now, growing smaller and quieter all the time in the abandoned wastelands outside of the Quarantine Zones, and in a small and quiet world, sometimes it helps to be cautious.

It's unusual to find a roving party of more than ten people out in this part of the world, and more unusual, Erik decides, to find one made out of both humans and mutants, by the looks of it. The humans are heavily armed with automatic rifles, gas masks hanging at their hips, ready to be pulled on at a moment's notice, their black body armor emblazoned with an acronym that's lost all relevance in the dark days of the world. 

The mutants, now, the mutants are strange. They're all young, some barely out of boyhood. There's a pair of slender girls, one blonde and blue-eyed, one dark-haired with bronzed skin. Two boys, one pale, one dark, squatting next to the fire, whispering and laughing. Then there's an older one, in a tweed suit, of all things to go traipsing about the badlands in, with neatly combed hair and unnaturally red lips, sitting on a rock and speaking amicably to one of the humans. 

None of them look visibly different from the humans outside of the gear difference, but then, this far out of the Quarantine Zones, only madmen and mutants dared wander about evidently unarmed and unarmored. 

_Very good,_ a trim, British voice whispers, and Erik jerks back from his hiding spot high up on the choked wreck of a highway with shock. He looks around wildly, then realizes the voice is in his head, and snorts.

"Which one are you?" he whispers. Amusement purrs warm and steady in his mind, like the afterimage of a gentle laugh, and he stiffens. "What are you hunting?"

The older one on a rock glances up briefly in his direction, before turning back to the human. Him, then. _Yes_ , the voice returns, earnest and soft, _I'm pleased to meet you at last, Erik Lehnsherr. My name is Charles Xavier._

It's the 'at last' that gets him. Anger twists unhappily in his gut, curled about wariness, and Erik grits his teeth. The automatic guns probably won't hurt him any, but he doesn't know the mutants that he sees, and a mind-reader is undoubtedly a dangerous thing. As silently as he can, he starts to worm away from the side of the concrete rail, squeezing quietly between two wrecked old cars.

 _Wait_ , the voice continues, unhurried, pleasant. _We have a proposition for you, Erik. A trade._

"Trade?"

 _You are looking for someone. We have information about him. While you have abilities that we need._ Charles sounds reasonable. It sounds like it's a deal that Erik can trust. But if Erik Lehnsherr knows one thing about life in a small world, it's that trust is hard bought and harder to earn. He's learned some good lessons growing up in a shit-and-mud filled camp of penned people, most of them dead on their feet, walking on only because they hadn't quite realized it yet in the dull spark remaining in their minds. 

Pity the Great Infection hadn't struck earlier. Perhaps there wouldn't have been a war. 

"Get out of my head," he mutters, as he feels his way quietly around the parked cars. Metal hums and whispers around him, and he's alert. Quiet. Highways are bad places as a rule, and he only crawled onto this one to get a better look at the hunting party. After all, some victims had died, Infected, while strapped into their cars, and although Erik's mutant blood can't be affected by spores through breathing or wounds, he can still get tetanus or worse from the damned.

 _Sebastian Shaw._ Charles whispers into his mind, as unhurriedly as ever. _You've seen the people whom I'm seated with. They have files on him._

Erik knows better than to laugh. He exhales instead. Whatever files the CIA could have had on Shaw are likely to be months out of date, at the least. Since the great outbreaks. Since the shrinking of the sprawling, so-called Land of the Free into the heavily armed, human-only Quarantine Zones. Since the flight of the mutants to scattered settlements. "Shouldn't trust humans," he murmurs. "Fucking traitor."

 _Not all of them are the same._ The quiet certainty that the words carry in his mind could only be woven by a telepath. _Agent MacTaggert and I have the same goals._

"And what's that?" Erik sneers. The woman whom Charles had been talking to, evidently. He keeps creeping down the stationary, rusting hulks of cars, towards the ramp exit of the highway. 

_A cure._

"Impossible."

 _Nothing is impossible._

To his annoyance, Erik realizes that he's stopped walking. He takes another step, then he stops again. "Why should we care? We're immune to the Infection."

By way of response, Charles drowns him. He absorbs years upon years' worth of genetic research, of the sciences' basic principles, of control groups and theories of evolution and the species. He absorbs reams of information about the growing spread of the Infected, even into the Quarantine Zones. He understands months of study into the nature of the Infection itself, into its consummate ability to mutate and self-improve and spread. 

Erik understands, at the end, that his own immunity to the Infection, his, Charles, and all other mutants like him, may only be temporary after all. He understands this propped against a car, dry-heaving and wrung out with the explosion of new ideas, new information, data and statistics within his mind. 

_My apologies_ , Charles murmurs, as Erik gasps to a stop, vaguely glad that he had run out supplies yesterday and hadn't found anything to eat since. Nothing in his stomach. _But the situation is volatile._

"Why do you need me?" Erik whispers, suspicious to the end, wiping his mouth.

 _Because the cure is another mutant. Because all attempts to locate and secure him to date have failed. We know roughly where he must be. But to find him and to catch him..._ Charles trails off, leaving motes of disquiet and whispers of uncertainty.

"And you think that I can find him? Why?"

 _His skeleton,_ Charles whispers, at once now soothing and ruthless, _Is coated with adamantium._

II.

Erik's been in and out of all the Quarantine Zones before, because it's child's play to make a bodyscanner come up with any result that he likes. He's been to heavily militarised Chicago, visited the dense slums in overcrowded San Francisco, even threaded his way through the outskirts of dangerous, abandoned New York. But he's never seen a base of operations like this.

"CIA blacksite," the blonde mutant girl tells him, smiling and pretty and chatty and far, far too young for a war that nobody's asked for. "Ugly thing, isn't it?"

And it _is_ an ugly thing, a concrete pustule of a walled zone squatting on a large open field with a good line of vision in all directions: nice, flat lands where Infected can be picked off with high powered scopes. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run, if it came to that. Erik grits his teeth and wonders, not for the first time, if he's made the right decision. 

They run through at least three checkpoints before they get into the interior, a sterile nightmare of labyrinthine corridors and reinforced glass. He can feel metal through the concrete, in the pipes and the vents, but it does little to soothe his temper. Charles has long disappeared off with the woman - MacTaggert, Erik surmises - and he lets the blonde girl show him around the living quarters.

He's exchanged one small world for a smaller one. Erik glances thoughtfully at the tiny, circular garden outside, to the even smaller disc of darkening sky above. He's trapped like a rat. 

"Would you like a drink?" the girl asks him.

"No," he says curtly, and decides, out of a lack of anything further to do, to settle down in one of the armchairs. 

The boys stare at him, then at the girl, unnerved, and by some unspoken signal all of them flee the room in different directions. Erik closes his eyes, content to be alone, and the Nazi coin slips out of his pocket, to curl in and around his splayed fingers. The ritual relaxes him, quietens him, and manages to swallow some of his unease and panic. This is a job that _does_ need to be done, as much as he doesn't trust his newfound 'friends'. 

_Glad to hear it,_ Charles murmurs into his mind, and Erik's eyes snap open. He's alone in the room, but-

"If you want to talk to me, get here and talk to me."

 _After this meeting, certainly._ Charles sounds amused. 

Erik's initial opinions about the unlikely look of Charles had only worsened during the walk back to base. Charles was an academic: that was clear enough from the borrowed memories. The way he moved and walked, his _shoes_ , his tone, all pointed to one thing - the telepath was a lab rat, normally sedentary, probably unearthed from his laboratory and books just to help the CIA find Erik. 

Still, there was a ruthlessness to Charles, an uncompromising depth under his brilliant blue eyes and his plush smile, and Erik's initial conclusion that Charles was but one of many pawns had been quickly shaken, a day away from the blacksite. It was Charles who commanded the CIA detachment, not Agent MacTaggert, for all that he had said nothing at all when they had come across a pocket of Infected: a pack of runners and a clicker. He had smiled, sat on a rock, and closed his eyes, and the Agents had all walked away masked into the ruins, as though listening to closed circuit radio, while the other mutants had arranged themselves around him defensively. 

Human CIA agents. Listening to _Charles_. Why? Because Charles could sense Infected? Did those things still send out brain signals, or whatever it was that a telepath could pick up?

 _Very good,_ Charles murmurs encouragingly into his mind. _So you noticed_.

"Those damned things can still think? How could you see them?"

 _The... less heavily Infected... still have brain synapses. The fungal Infection feeds on living hosts._ Charles notes. _They start by infecting the brain and killing brain cells, and eventually grow out of the brainpan, but until then, yes, I can sense them._

Erik shivers, and in his momentary lapse of concentration, the coin drops to the carpet, Hastily, he summons it back to his hand, and clenches his fist tightly around it until it cuts into his flesh. He fights disgust, and swallows the spit in his mouth, exhaling slowly. He remembers his first Infected kill. He had stolen and flown a small airplane from Haifa on the trail of Shaw, and had somehow, through sheer luck, thievery and circumstance, gotten through the Israeli Iron Wall through to Portugal and then had changed the mad flight over the North Atlantic Ocean, only to crash-land in what was left of Delaware. 

He hadn't realized how far the infection had spread in the United States of America, or he would never have tried to make the crossing. Probably. Ocean City had been a ghost town, its amusement parks silent, its boardwalks filled with shuffling horrors. He had managed to find a car that still worked, with fuel, but it had been a near thing, and in his escape he had dragged down a street sign over a pursuing runner pack, maiming or killing them all. 

Some of the runners had once been children. 

_Some would say,_ Charles murmurs into his mind, _That trying to settle a blood feud during the end of the world might be... a trifle obsessive._

"Some might say that sifting through another's private thoughts is a trifle _invasive_ ," Erik retorts coldly, and there's a faint touch of concern and apology before he can't feel Charles in his mind anymore. 

Good.

III.

MacTaggert seems to have successfully bullied Charles into wearing sensible clothes for what might be a long trek deep within Canada: the telepath's been bundled into a thick gray parka and comfortable boots. He's unarmed, which is, in Erik's opinion, suicidally stupid, even with his CIA friends around, and the luck of the draw proves him right when they're two days or so out from the Lethbridge Quarantine Zone.

It's not so bad far up north, Erik had been thinking, when the ambush had happened. Surely the freezing cold had served to put any Infected here on ice. They had been following the Crowsnest Highway, heading up towards the mountainous national parks, and the first night that they had stopped in abandoned Fort MacLeod had been cold, but uneventful. It's in Claresholm that they run into the stalker packs, for all that they had camped out quietly in the RCAF hangars and dug in. 

They had been prepared for the first two packs, thanks to Charles, but the gunfire had attracted too much attention: the stalker packs had been trouble, but the trio of bloaters that had lurched in behind them, all but impervious to gunfire or thrown metal stilts and firing spore packs of their own - they had been the final straw. Erik manages to get Charles out, somehow, but only just, and they run and run into the night until they can't run anymore, leaving the scattered bark and retort of gunfire behind them, God, the _screams_. 

All the while, as they run, Charles whispers a harsh and low litany barely under his breath, "... heard them I heard them I heard them..." but Erik grits his teeth and tunes him out, focusing on running until his lungs burn, bullying Charles down the road with him.

In the morning, Charles is pale but quiet, blinking slowly even as Erik unhurriedly checks through the packs they had thought to grab and doles out a breakfast ration. They can't chance a fire, not with the roving packs, but Charles makes no complaint as they keep walking, heading further up, heading for Calgary. The highway seems abandoned, but-

"Charles," Erik murmurs. It seems folly to even speak, in the dead silence around them, but he can't see anything. 

"We're not being followed," Charles says dreamily. 

He's been dazed ever since the massacre of his CIA bodyguard/escort/minions in Claresholm, and not even their desperate flight and the uncomfortable night spent sleeping on the roof of an old substation had snapped him out of it. Erik tries not to be worried, or furious. If Charles' mind has broken, or whatever it is, then Erik is stuck far north of where he's meant to come, with fuck all for supplies and a hell of a lot of stalker packs between himself and Lethbridge, and little hope of getting back south to look for Shaw unless he manages to hijack the CIA helicopter. 

Assuming that their gracious, _human_ hosts in Lethbridge haven't already taken it apart for precious fuel and spare parts. 

"You are sure that this mutant is still in Calgary?"

Charles nods, very slowly, and then he flinches as Erik loses his patience and grabs him by the shoulders, shaking him roughly. 

" _Charles_ ," Erik snaps. "Your escort isn't here any longer. If you want to find this mutant, you need to survive. That means no _verdamnt_ daydreaming. Understand?"

Charles blinks at him, then stiffens, and nods meekly. "I was listening," he murmurs apologetically, "For Infected," and Erik's anger lessens, to be replaced slowly by awkward guilt. Charles had only been doing his job. 

Erik, on the other hand, had been far less useful as a bodyguard than he had thought. The stalker packs he had managed to slow, but bloaters ignored damage from any metal that he had been able to throw at them within the stripped down old hangars. He hadn't known. He had always managed to successfully avoid the more dangerous kind of Infected, when he had been alone. It's easy to be quiet on your feet when you're alone.

"It's getting difficult. You see," Charles adds, in the same low voice, "Not so long ago, the world to me was a symphony. All these voices. All these minds. Especially... where I was..." his voice trails away, and when his blue eyes lift to Erik's, there's a hard, feverish gleam to them that's akin to madness. _Now it's like shouting into the dark._

Erik nods, slowly. Quarantine zones had long decided to shut out anyone who scanned Infected or Mutant, just to be 'safe', and the CIA operation in the blacksite had seemed fairly skeletal - barely enough guards to patrol the grounds, some teams of agents, some mutants, and mostly scientists. A drop compared to the ocean that humanity had once been. 

"I can feel people die," Charles continues bleakly, and now Erik wishes that he hadn't said anything. Wishes that Charles would be quiet. "And I can... the brain pulses from runners, particularly. They're all still semi-coherent. Words. Phrases. Fear, hunger. Pain." Charles' brilliant blue stare drifts out over the abandoned stretch of land around them. "So much pain."

Erik says nothing, but he fights the urge to shudder. When they camp for the night in Stavely, Charles huddles close for the warmth, in the corner of an abandoned general store, and Erik curls close and doesn't object. He doesn't know why he's still following Charles.

IV.

Nanton's overrun, and they waste time giving it a wide berth. They stay the night in an abandoned farmhouse, long looted and gutted, and Erik isn't surprised when Charles' touch, this time, is greedy. Charles had turned ashen pale the moment he had come 'within range' of Nanton, and Erik wonders briefly if they're the only people left alive on this side of the world out of Lethbridge. Whether their chase of this single mutant in undoubtedly overrun Calgary is an incredibly stupid idea.

"He's alive," Charles murmurs. Erik's become slightly more acclimatised to Charles' tendency to start talking as though Erik had spoken what he had been thinking of out aloud. 

"How can you be sure?"

"This man is very hard to kill." Charles hesitates, for a long moment, then he smiles, pale in the light of the fire that they had dared to keep going in the hearth. "He has a healing factor."

Ah. Erik supposes that he should have known. "And you think that you can make a..." he gropes for a word from the information that Charles had pushed into his mind, "Serum? Out of his blood? There are a lot of humans out there. And only one of this mutant."

"It's a start. Hank - that's one of the scientists - thinks that by studying how the healing factor operates we might understand how to counter-"

"Even if this mutant had no healing factor, if he had, say, just the ability to change the colours of his fingernails," Erik says harshly, "He would have been immune."

"Yes, of course-"

"Unless there's a way to give _everyone_ a healing factor, we're wasting our time."

"I think not," Charles says, with his infuriating calm, and would say no more for the rest of the night, even pressed tight against Erik.

V.

No metal-skeletoned mutant with a healing factor greets them at the ruined roads into Calgary, and the city, according to pale, hard-eyed Charles, is infested. Erik wants to leave, Charles refuses, and in the end, grumbling, irritated, he follows Charles nervously about a slow circuit of the abandoned city. There's a pale cover of snow dusting the wrecked city, and the devastation almost seems beautiful in its completeness.

At least it seems still. Dead. Erik likes stillness. Maybe the Infected have mostly retreated underground, into the darker, warmer places that they seem to prefer. As long as they stay quiet and above ground-

Charles is already walking briskly down the road, bypassing cars left where they had stopped, and Erik bites out a quiet curse before hurrying over to grab at Charles' wrist. "What did I say about cars?" he hisses.

 _I heard you the first time. There's nothing in those._ Charles' response is reasonable, firm. _Speak in thoughts if you must speak at all, Erik. That building to our right with the red door has a few runners idling in the reception._

Erik shudders. _And you don't sense our new friend anywhere?_

 _We need to get somewhere secure, and central, where I can concentrate. Where _you_ can start looking for our friend._

Erik doesn't like going indoors in ruined cities. Cities meant Infected, or bandits, or both. But Charles is strolling down the road as though he's taking a walk in an open fucking park, and Erik - Erik has no choice but to follow. It feels like all of that nowadays, all the time. 

They eventually decide to use an apartment off the main street, high up, accessible only via a fire escape - Erik calls down the ladder with a gesture and tries to ease as much of the sound as he can. He doesn't have to have bothered - this deep into the city, it's not all silent. There's the wind, cold and howling through the streets, unimpeded. There's the creak and moan of abandoned buildings - once homes, now tombs. They pull up the ladder when they're in one of the more habitable apartments and shift a cabinet against the entryway, and then melt down some snow that they had gathered in a pot for water and cooking. 

Charles sits cross-legged on a dusty old couch, eyes closed, for all the world meditating while Erik makes a small fire out in a pot out in the balcony. He eats little, like always, but today, he says little as well, frowning, quiet. He's nothing like the dapper, spoiled-looking scientist Erik had met only a week ago: his clothes are dirty and torn and there's a hardness to his face that Erik doesn't remember.

Maybe he had just missed it. Maybe not. That night, Charles curls against him in the blankets that they had piled together from the beds in the apartment and presses one hand into Erik's parka once his fingers are warm. The coupling is rough, brutal and quick, and at the end of it, legs spread under Erik, both of them sticky, Charles laughs, slow and hoarse, his eyes dreamy.

"What?" Erik whispers, a trifle annoyed - he's tired, and all he had wanted to do was sleep: but it's hard to think when Charles smiles at him, as he does now. 

"The way your mind flashes, when you're close. Not just you. People. The way it crumbles." Charles smiles then, red, wide, and Erik understands with a surge of anger and disgust what Charles is referring to, what sort of correlation he's so blithely making. Synapses, eh? Collapsing brainwaves? He glares at Charles furiously, but Charles is curling up again, yawning, and he doesn't shift in the least even when Erik reluctantly settles back down. 

If you're born to a symphony, Erik thinks, as he watches and waits for Charles to go to sleep, what happens to your mind when it stops?

VI.

They find the mutant in, of all places, a wrecked remnant of a bar, sitting at the counter with a line of whisky bottles across to his left. Locating him had been nothing short of a miracle - the city is a bright morass of metal, and trying to pick out something skeleton-shaped out of the jungle had been near impossible. It had only been pure luck that Erik had picked out some movement when he and Charles had been carefully making their way down Stephen Avenue.

There's an animal stink to the mutant, even over the chill whistle of the wind, and his parka is filthy, muddy and worse. He doesn't even look up when they approach. His hair is pulled up in two great tufts to either side of his head, like horns, and it's matted and unruly.

"Fuck off," he tells them flatly. His accent is thick. Canadian.

"Is it fun here? You, living alone with only the Infected for company?" Charles pulls himself onto a stool. 

"'Least they make quiet company, which is good company by my books, bub." The mutant doesn't look up. "What d'you want? Are you from Stryker?"

"No. But we are here to offer you a proposition." Charles explains the cure, the mutant's abilities, a serum, and at the end of it, the mutant glances first at Erik, his dark eyes unreadable and wild, then over to Charles. 

"Huh," is all he says, then he swallows the whisky in the bottle he's holding, convulsively. "Funniest story I've heard in a while."

"It's true."

"Don't I doubt it," the mutant grunts, "But I haven't had such a nice fucking time in the hands of government lab rats t'date."

"There's no government now."

"There's still eggheads like you," the mutant points at him, "Supported by muscle like him." A meaty thumb jerks back over in Erik's direction. "Best get out of the city. Or help yourselves to a drink. Whatever it is, I don't care. Leave me alone."

"So you won't come along with us?" Charles asks, his tone sorrowful.

"Fat chance of that."

"My friend here," Charles notes, in a tone without changing inflection, "Has the ability to control metal. Which, I believe, is what your skeleton is plated with. If he so wished, he could walk you from here to-"

"And when he needs to sleep? What then, eh?" the mutant cuts in, with a cold smile. Erik tries not to tense up visibly. He's long learned to recognise the like, first in the camps, then in his increasingly desperate, dangerous trek over Infected and bandit-overrun country, looking for Shaw. This mutant is a killer.

"While I," Charles adds, unperturbed, "Am a telepath, and a very powerful one, if I may say so myself. Tell me, Logan, would you like to know your real name?" 

Logan straightens up, narrow-eyed, and then he scratches slowly at his chin. Erik can feel the metal there, rare metal, within Logan, the humming purr of it, a thin sheeting. It can't be natural, even with their abilities. 

"Usually," Logan says dryly, "People apply the carrot first before trying a stick, just sayin'."

"I'm unconventional." Charles smiles, his red, wide smile. 

"Hah!" Logan snorts. "That you are. Fine. If you can piece together what's left of my head, I'll go and see what your operation's about." 

"Good. Shall we go, or do you need to pack?"

"Let's go," Logan says gruffly, and uncurls from the bar stool, stamping over for the door. Charles starts to follow, though he stops when he notices that Erik has stayed where he is.

"Coming?"

Erik watches Charles closely, the upright cast of his shoulders, his red smile, the hard gleam to his eyes. There's something not quite right there, like a hairline crack to a marble sculpture, and he's not so sure if he likes it. He's not even so sure if he _dislikes_ it. 

"Shaw," Charles says finally, "Was last heard of in Las Vegas." He inclines his head at Erik, and hops away after Logan. 

Erik exhales, shivering. Charles' words should have excited him, fanned the anger and hatred that he's been nursing since the camps, but instead, he's unsettled. Hollowed. Curious. He looks to the counter, then back to Charles' retreating back, and stuffs his hands into his parka. One more day, then he'll see.


End file.
